“My favorite Mexican food has got to be anything my grandma makes.”
-Carolina Cisneros, Daughter of Owner of La Mariposa Market, Tienda Mexicana Grocery, Pelican Rapids, MN
When you step into the Mariposa Market on N. Broadway in Pelican Rapids, Minnesota, piñatas hang from the ceiling, and you’re met with shelves loaded with taquis, chips, and candies you won't find elsewhere in the county. As you move around the surprisingly large space, you can find anything from paletas and guava juice, to freshly packaged beans, hominy, and dried chiles, queso fresco, tortillas and fresh produce line the refrigerated area as accompaniments to any of the pantry staples and various hot sauces you could ever need. Carolina is most likely the friendly face you will see behind the register at the Mariposa Market. She tends the till while her mom, Caya Bravo, the owner of the market takes care of the business side of running a small town grocery- ordering merchandise, securing her products by driving to the Twin Cities, or to the panadería in Long Prairie, restocking shelves and juggling the various demands of a small-business owner. A lot of people might not know that running a small grocery store is so time intensive. Distributors of Latin American foods will not drive further north than the Twin Cities, so any of the food items you see on the shelves at Mariposa Market required someone to drive to get them. Often times, Caya will return from a trip to the Twin Cities after midnight where she and Carolina will unload the truck into the wee morning hours. While some might wonder why it’s more expensive to shop at the store, think of the convenience we have because of the work that the staff of the Mariposa Market has done for us! The market serves as an important place for the Latinx community of the region. It is a place where restaurants in town (and the surrounding areas) can order and purchase the specialty food items they need. Community members can make wire transfers at the shop, sending remittances to relatives in the diaspora. And, the Mariposa Market caters to not only the Mexican, and Mexican American community that largely have roots from Guanajuato, but the Mariposa Market also stocks products so that Salvadoreaño, Guatemalan and Nicaraguan community members can also find a taste of home.
Carolina is committed to providing access to these rich cultural flavors, tastes, and foods as her mom’s number one helper at the store. Currently studying Graphic Design at college, Carolina helps out her mom by keeping the store open daily and interfacing with customers. While she was living in Moorhead for college prior to the pandemic, she would come home and work all day on Saturday and Sunday. The store is usually very busy on the weekends, and Carolina would find it difficult to manage the store duties and her studies. Carolina has been in Minnesota since she was three, and is used to living in smaller towns, starting off in Long Prairie and then moving to Pelican by the time she was school aged. Pelican has been her main home until she left for college. Her dedication and commitment to the family business shines through when you learn about the grueling hours she works to try to keep the store open for the community. Though surrounded by food all day, Carolina isn’t much of a cook herself. And while she enjoys the restaurant opportunities she has in town, her favorite Mexican food is her grandma’s cooking. Anytime Carolina goes to Long Prairie to visit her abuela, she looks forward to her cooking. Whether tamales, gorditas, or posole is on the stove, Carolina knows that she will be met with the joy and love of Mexican food in her abuela’s kitchen.
Trained Pharmacist Turned Baker Wows With Her Artful Cakes
Miriam Perez moved to Pelican in 2012, but it wasn’t until three years ago that she started baking cakes. Craving a taste of home, and a new hobby, Miriam took to the internet to learn about how to make a tres leche cake from scratch. Her first effort for her husband’s birthday turned out flat but tasty. Instead of giving up, like some might, Miriam began studying more to figure out how to perfect the delicious deserts. In Mexico she had studied to become a pharmacist, so baking was a good fit for her, as someone familiar with experimenting, blending, and measuring different ingredients, cakes became the vehicle for her search for new outcomes of mixing different elements together. While she loves living in Pelican she missed tastes and smells of the bakery she used to live by in Mexico. She wasn’t a big fan of the American style box cake, and while others in the community might make a tres leche cake for an occasion here or there, she found that they still didn’t taste quite like the ones she’d grown up used to enjoying. Seeing she needed to make her own, she began watching as many YouTube videos as she could to figure out how to make a better tres leche cake than what she had found in Otter Tail County. After many hours of study in-between maintaining her home and her work as a full-time caregiver for her three children, Miriam would watch people making their cakes on the Internet and then she would get to work. It has been a process of trial and error, especially because Miriam takes some advice, techniques, and ideas from some videos and mixes and matches them with other bakers’ ideas about cake baking. This is how she created the mocha tres leche cake and how she’s perfected the Impossible Cake (a layer of flan on top a chocolate base). Over the last three years she’s focused on not only having a delicious cake, but one that looks beautiful. She depends on her KitchenAid stand mixer to whip her ingredients to fluffy in order to get her cakes to their proper height. While she once had to search far and wide for the right cream to make the frosting for her tres leche cake, Larry’s Super Market, in Pelican Rapids now stocks it. And a quick peek at her Instagram account shows that she has an eye for presentation. Topping her creations with fresh fruit brings an element of glamor to the cake that she is known for throughout the community. Requests from friends and families run through her husband through his work at the local turkey plant. And Miriam ends up baking one or two cakes a week for friends and family gatherings. The Mayor of Pelican has been encouraging Miriam to open up a bakery in town, and this is something she’s interested in doing. Now that she’s perfected cakes, she has started expanding her knowledge and skills for baking other important cultural foods like the Rosca de Reyes Cake for Three Kings Day celebrations and pan de muerte for Día de los Muertos celebrations in early November. She wants to learn more about Mexican breads so she can have a well stocked bakery one day in the future. After enjoying both a slice of her tres leche cake and flan, I know I am in good company when I say, I hope that bakery will be opening soon!
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This activity is part of the Otter Tail County Story Mapping Project, a partnership between Rethos, The Otter Tail County Historical Society, and Springboard for the Arts with support from the Minnesota Historical Society. This project was made possible in part by the people of Minnesota through a grant funded by and appropriation to the Minnesota Historical Society from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.